Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

A hard carom off a wall, and with a gasp she came up short against the steel door, yanking furiously at the handle before remembering that all the doors in the hospital wards were locked on both sides, and a key was required to enter or exit.

She had keys, they were in her left hand, and she fumbled with them, jamming one after another into the keyhole until she found the key that fit, then twisting her wrist clockwise.

The bolt, strangely loose, seemed to yield immediately, as if it had never been secured at all.

She tugged the handle again, pulling the door inward. Still it would not open.

Stuck.

Somehow the door was stuck, wouldn’t open, and she was trapped in here, no way out.

Cray stepped out of the night into the north corridor of Ward C, then clicked on his flashlight. The red-filtered beam wavered over the tile floor and concrete walls, reaching halfway down the hall.

She was not within sight. But her tracks were. The prints of muddy shoes, tracing an irregular, panicky path away from the door.

He breathed in, out. There was a calmness in him, the strange calm before the gale.

He had her. She could not escape.

True, she had a passkey that would unlock the east door. But the bolt on that door had been broken years ago, and rather than bothering to replace it, Cray had merely ordered the door padlocked.

Padlocked from outside.

The door could not be opened from within, a fact Kaylie no doubt had discovered by now.

She could double back and run straight into him. Or hide at the farthest end of the east corridor and wait for his arrival.

Or she could scream. Scream for help.

He would like that. He had never heard her scream.

No one would answer her cries, if there were any. Screams were common on the grounds of the institute. The staff had long ago learned to ignore such distractions.

Cray turned and shut the north door behind him, then carefully locked it with his passkey.

Then he pivoted to face the corridor again and advanced, guided by a beam of red, into the beckoning dark.

Kaylie stumbled away from the door that would not open, her hands slapping blindly at the side wall in search of an escape route, finding the door to the last cell in the row, not a good place to hide, but the only place left.

The press of a button released the pneumatic lock. The door swung wide, and she slipped into the room, then shut the door and looked for a latch on this side, but there was none, because in rooms like this, patients were locked in. They could not lock others out.

In the mesh window of the door, a faint red light appeared.

Flashlight. Still far away, but growing brighter.

Cray.

He had turned the corner, rounding the bend in the L, and he was closing in.

Cray aimed his flashlight down the east hallway, alert for any blur of movement.

Nothing.

He scanned the floor. Her tracks, increasingly faint as the dirt was pounded off her shoes, disappeared a few yards away.

She must have run to the exit and found it locked. After that, she would have backtracked. But how far?

No way to tell. The only certainty was that she was hidden… and close.

Rows of closed doors lined both sides of the corridor. Rooms where patients had been domiciled — stalls for cattle, pens for sheep.

Kaylie had been kept in one of these rooms, many years ago.

It was right for her to die here.

He would take her face, peel it from the subcutaneous tissue that wrapped her skull, and in the flashlight’s red glow he would display it to her, the bleeding mask — her own face, disembodied, the last thing she would see.

Later — tomorrow night, perhaps — he would bury her in the woods. She would never be found. Another successful escape, or so the world would think.

But first he had to find her.

Behind which door was his prize?

He moved to the nearest one, thumbed the button, aimed the flash inside.

Empty.

To the door on the opposite side. Same procedure. Same result.

There were twenty more doors. He would open them one by one. The task would not take long.

His sense of calm receded. A new force grew in him, wild and strong. A keening exultation.

He had known it before. On the hunt with Justin, and later, hunting alone. He had known it each time he tracked his prey in the sallow moonlight.

It was an inner heat, an excitement of the blood, a sudden rush of pure stimulation that sharpened his sight and hearing, even his olfactory sense.

He was a predator. And he knew in this moment — a transient thought, lost before it could be captured — but for one moment only, he knew that on those nights when he stripped bare the mask, the first mask he cast off was his own.

John Cray was nothing and nowhere. There was only the driving heartbeat, the itch of need, the flash and eddy of unfiltered sensation, and the knife, sharp as teeth, the knife and the urge to use it as he opened the next door and the next.

He lifted his head, and losing himself entirely, he bayed at shadows, a wolf under the moon.

Kaylie heard the noise, echoing on stone, on tile.

A coyote’s howl. But not a coyote, of course.

Him.

Some answering panic rose in her own throat, and she nearly let loose a fatal scream that would draw him instantly to this room.

But that was what he wanted, wasn’t it?

Not just her death.

Madness.

I strip away the mask, Cray had told her in the desert. A human being is an onion, layer upon layer…. Peel the onion, strip off the mask, and what’s left is the naked essence. What’s left is what is real.

First he took his victim’s mind and spirit, and then, only then, would he take her life.

She understood all this, saw it clearly, and with a snap of altered perspective she came back to herself — not entirely, but enough.

She knew who she was. She was Kaylie McMillan. Not a hunted animal. She was a person. She mattered. She couldn’t give up yet.

That howl again. Closer.

Cray must be searching each room in turn.

This room was last in line. Even so, he would not take long to reach it.

Kaylie backed away from the door, retreating into a corner, putting distance between herself and Cray.

She had keys. Sharp. She could fight him. Go for his face, his eyes. She—

Her hip banged against cold steel.

A commode, still embedded in the floor — invisible in the dark, its shape apparent only to her touch.

She’d stood on a commode like this on several nights many years ago, fumbling at the grille over the air vent, straining to loosen the screws that held it in place, with nothing but a strip of torn elastic from her mattress cover to improve her grip on the small, devilishly slippery screw heads

The job had taken hours, nights.

But now—

Keys in her hand.

A key could turn a screw.

Nearby, a steel door clanged. Cray was at least halfway down the hall.

She stepped onto the commode bowl’s lidless rim, reaching blindly for the vent cover in the ceiling. Her fingers touched the grille, velvety with dust. Four screws secured the cover to the ceiling. She found the first of them and struggled to insert a key into the notch in the screw head.

The key was too big. Wouldn’t fit.

Another door clanged, closer.

She tried another key, thinner than the last.

It fit. She wrenched her wrist counterclockwise, and the screw turned, loosening.

From the hall, a wild baying and another slam of steel.

The screw unwound another few turns and dropped into the dark.

Three left.

Not enough time.

She found the second screw and worked it free.

Glanced back.

Red glow in the mesh window of the cell door.

His flashlight, very near.